by Bob Shaw
"What's happening?" he cried. "Is there – "
She silenced him by raising one hand while she addressed the communications panel with the other.
"…is definite," a man's voice was saying. "We've got it! The residual sphere is being stripped from the outside. There are five skim-off bands – call them whatever you like – two in the northern hemisphere, two in the southern, and one very close to the equator. All the bands are widening rapidly, God help us! There is no way of predicting how long it will be before this station is…"
The silence in the control room became total.
Nicklin focused his gaze on the world cloud, and – now that he knew exactly where to look – he could see evidence of the Good Fairy's handiwork. There was a subtle, twinkling agitation along the equator. But in essence it was the opposite of twinkling. It was a disturbance in a motionless pattern caused by the progressive disappearance of tiny light sources.
The world cloud was visibly being unwound … like a vast ball of wool … into nothingness.
"They've gone," Fleischer said in the voice of a timid child. "The spaceports have all gone."
"We don't need spaceports," Nicklin shouted, refusing to play the game of logic. "We can keep on going! We can go into orbit around any fucking planet!"
"What good would that do? If we can never land?"
"It would be better than being left out … here!"
"Perhaps you're right." Fleischer nodded as she considered the proposition, and then – incredibly – her face lit up with perverse triumph as she saw how to refute it.
"The trouble is, Mr Nicklin, that we can't reach any – as you put it – fucking planet. Things have changed for the worse out there. The disappearances speeded up while you were asleep … and they're still speeding up … and within a matter of hours there'll be no planets left – fucking or otherwise!"
CHAPTER 22
There was a peculiar rightness about what he was doing now, Nicklin decided.
For a period of some twelve hours he had sat in the control room, mesmerised, watching the world cloud disappear at an ever-increasing rate. In the beginning the process had been almost imperceptible, then a darkening sparsity had become noticeable in five widening strips. The effect had added to the awful beauty of the spectacle, giving the cloud the semblance of a pointillist painting of one gigantic banded planet. After that the dissolution had become all too apparent, as swath after swath thinned out into a blackness through which remote stars were beginning to show. At some point in the progression the Tara had finally discarded its outward velocity and begun the painfully slow return, but nobody in the control room had noticed its change of status. It had been impossible for the watchers to do anything but watch. Even their ability to think seemed to have been suspended as the discrete entity which had once been Orbitsville was reduced to filmy wisps, to fast-fading strands of gossamer, and finally to nothing. Nothing at all. The 650-million new-born worlds had been dematerialised, and only a small sun remained, the lone source of light and heat in a region of emptiness which extended for many light years all around.
What comes next? Nicklin had thought numbly. Where do we go from here?
What had come next, within a matter of seconds, was an intercom message for Nicklin from a woman who had been bathing her children in the communal washrooms on 24 Deck. She was angry because the water temperature in the showers had become erratic, and she wanted the fault corrected without delay. She also wanted to know why Nicklin spent all his time lounging around on the control deck instead of attending to his duties.
The reminder that life would make its quotidian demands until the very end had come as a blessing to Nicklin. He had left the seclusion of the control room immediately, and now – a man with an important mission – he was working his way down through the most populated levels of the ship. Because the Tara was carrying only half of its projected complement, the passengers had largely been free to decide where they would be accommodated, and the majority – obeying their instincts – had chosen the forward section, as far as possible from the engine cylinders.
By the time he reached 14 Deck, the first to give access to the engine cylinders, the sounds of human activity were fading above him. He continued his downward drift, fingers barely touching the stringers of the ladder, and was passing 17 Deck when, almost of their own accord, his hands clamped on the dural bars, bringing him to an abrupt halt. There followed a moment of total confusion, then he realised what had caused the autonomous reaction.
A short distance to his right, in the curving primary wall of the passenger cylinder, there was a door leading into the adjacent engine cylinder.
To someone not so well acquainted with the metallic bones and guts and nerves of the Tara the sight of that door would have had little or no significance, but for Nicklin it came as a psychic hammer blow – because he knew there was no engine access door on 17 Deck.
He froze in place on the ladder, looking around him. The rest of the small landing was exactly as it should have been. Behind him there were two doors leading into passenger suites, and stencilled signs clearly proclaimed that he was on what he knew to be 17 Deck. He had no need of the signs to tell him where he was – the surrounding rivet and weld patterns would have been enough – but he was confronted by an engine access door where no engine access door had any right to exist.
The door was real. He could see scratches on the green paint. He could see smudges on the nine white tablets of the lock's keyboard. The door was real!
"This is a dream," he said aloud, relieved at having explained the inexplicable. "This is one of those cognisant dreams, and to prove it–"
He punched the edge of the deck beside him with careless force and gasped as pain swept back through his nervous system from the point of impact. He looked at his knuckles and saw that patches of skin had been curled back. Tiny lentils of blood were appearing on the subcutaneous tissue.
There was no doubt that he was wide-awake – and the engine access door was still in place.
My memory for numbers has gone haywire, he extemporised as he stepped off the ladder and went to the door. A little molecule of the grey stuff has flipped or sprung a leak or whatever it is they do when they're starting to wear out. You always could reach the engines from 17 Deck. The fact that I don't remember it that way is neither here nor there, and to prove it…
He tapped the admittance number into the lock – 8949823 – and smiled as he heard the lock solenoid operating. Still got a few numbers left! He slowly pushed the door open and found himself looking into an enclosed space not much larger than a telephone kiosk. The arrangement was wrong, absolutely and totally wrong for the Tara, but he was now committed to proving to himself that wrong was right, and he stepped over the high threshold with a certain amount of brashness.
As the door sighed shut behind him he saw another door in the left-hand wall, and beside it was a small niche of the type which normally held fire-fighting equipment. In the niche was a body-curved flask of silver, upon which somebody had enamelled the words: DRINK ME. The lettering was excessively ornate and Nicklin grinned as he recognised Scott Hepworth's handiwork.
So you forgot about one of your stashes, you boozy old sod!
Still amused, he picked the flask up. It felt warm, and when he shook it he heard and felt the sloshing of a small amount of liquid. On impulse he removed the cap and took a drink of what proved to be tepid gin.
A real Hepworth special, that was. He loved his geneva zvtk fresh tonic and all the trimmings, but when necessary he would take it any way it came. As some playwright or other put it – when the mood was on him he would drink it out of a sore. I bet old Scott would be turning in his plastic wrapper if he knew he had missed this last drop.
There's just one thing I don't understand, though.
How come the gin is still warm?
Moving like a man in a dream, filled with premonitions that he was doing the wrong thing, Nicklin opened the inner door. Bey
ond it was a dimly lit space which seemed too large to be contained within the five-metre radius of the engine cylinder. Nicklin went in, allowing the door to close behind him. Above the door was a single bulkhead light casting a wan glow over a semicircle of empty deck. That was wrong, too, because most of the space within the cylinder should have been taken up by massive engine components. He tried to see beyond the vague boundary of illumination, but the outer darkness was impenetrable. An air current tugged momentarily at his hair and clothing, and it seemed sweet and pure, as though he were standing at the edge of a midnight plain.
After a few seconds a figure appeared in the darkness, coming towards him, and he groaned aloud – cowering back with knuckles pressed to his mouth – as he saw that it was Scott Hepworth.
"Good man, you found my medicine!" Hepworth said, taking the flask from Nicklin's inert fingers. "Where did I leave it?"
Nicklin groaned again as Hepworth raised the flask to his lips and took a drink. His neck seemed intact beneath his rumpled collar, but as he swallowed a clear fluid welled out through the front of his shirt.
"Go away," Nicklin mumbled through his knuckles. "You're dead!"
"Don't be so plebeian in your thinking, my boy," Hepworth said jovially. "Do I look dead?"
Nicklin studied the apparition before him and saw that it was perfect in every detail, from the smudged shoddiness of the clothing to the blue-rimmed blackhead at the side of the nose. "Get away from me, Scott," he pleaded. "I can't look at you."
"Very well – but I must say I'm deeply disappointed in you, Jim." Hepworth began to back off into the darkness. "I could have helped you with what's coming next. There are others waiting to meet you, and I could have helped you deal with them…"
As the Hepworth thing faded out of sight Nicklin grabbed the door handle and twisted hard. It refused to turn, just as he had expected, and now two other figures were approaching. One was Corey Montane – grinning a wet, lop-sided grin – and the other was a pretty young woman who looked quite wholesome and normal, except that the handle of a kitchen knife was protruding from her chest. The knife was moving in tune with her heart beats.
"Milly and I are happy now, Jim," Montane said, slipping his arm around the woman's waist. "And I want you to know that you can be happy, too. All you have to do is–"
"You're dead too!" Nicklin shouted. "Don't come near me! You're dead, and you're trying to make me think that I'm dead as well, but I'm still alive and this is only a dream!"
Montane and his wife exchanged concerned glances, all the while moving closer to him. "I hate to see you like this, Jim," Montane said. "And it's all so unnecessary. All you have to do is listen to–"
"Fuck off!" Nicklin screamed, covering his eyes.
He remained that way for as long as he dared, afraid that the two dreadful beings were stealthily closing in, bringing their sympathetic faces closer to his. But when he lowered his hands Montane and his wife had gone. The surrounding darkness was intact again, except that he could now see farther into it and his former impression of standing on a vast plain was reinforced. In the spurious, half-perceived distance there was the hint of an enormous presence, black curvatures imposed on blackness. Could it be a hill, a mountain of obsidian, repelling the light of unseen stars?
What have I done to deserve this? Nicklin asked himself, making another futile attempt to open the bulkhead door.
"I'll tell you what you've done," a familiar and yet unidentifiable voice said from just beyond the pool of tallowy light. "You have filled your head with negative thoughts and false concepts, little Jimmy Nicklin – and now you must suffer as a result."
"Who are you?" Nicklin quavered, sickened by a new premonition. "And why do you call me Jimmy? Nobody has called me Jimmy since–"
"Since you were a little boy, isn't that right?" The towering shape of Nicklin's great-uncle Reynard advanced into the cone of dismal light.
Nicklin cringed as he saw that this was not the figure of the scarcely-remembered real Uncle Reynard. This was the fearsome Uncle Reynard of the dream. This was the terrifying shape that his mother had insisted on treating as a perfectly acceptable human being in spite of the fact that it was over two metres tall, had spiky red-brown fur, feral yellow eyes, and a long snout surmounted by a Disney-animal nose which resembled a shiny black olive. And, as had happened before, recognition robbed the animated image of its oppressive power.
"You can't frighten me," Nicklin challenged.
"And why should anybody be frightened of a fine, handsome fellow like me?" the fox said, preening in his nineteenth-century wing collar and patched frock coat. "I fully understand why you wanted nothing to do with those other characters – especially the woman! Did you see the knife? – Ugh!" A look of revulsion passed over the fox's stylised features. "Between ourselves, Jimmy, you did the right thing in getting rid of that lot."
"I'm getting rid of you as well," Nicklin said. "You don't exist!"
"What a peculiar thing to say!" The fox cast a worried glance over his shoulder, then gave a laugh which exposed all his pointed teeth. "You wouldn't be able to talk to me if I didn't exist. It stands to reason, doesn't it? You see, this is mental space – and mental entities are just as real here as physical entities. You remember what you were told about mental space, don't you?"
Nicklin shook his head. "I wouldn't allow you to exist in any kind of space."
"Don't do this to me, Jimmy." Uncle Reynard glanced back into the darkness again, spraying cartoon-style droplets of sweat into the air from his forehead. "I can help you with what's coming next. You've got to have your interview with Gee-Vee, and I can–"
"Go away!"
The fox took a step backwards, his entire body beginning to ripple, and suddenly he was a thin, balding, unhappy looking man of about forty. Nicklin felt a stirring.of old memories. The creature before him purported to be his real Uncle Reynard.
"You can frig off too," Nicklin said.
"Don't do this to me, Jimmy," the creature pleaded. "All right, perhaps I was a bit too friendly with your mother after your old man died. Maybe you felt sort of betrayed – and I can't say as I blame you – but that's all in the past. You're a grown man now, Jimmy, and you must know how it is when a healthy young woman is–"
"Go away!"
"Let me explain something very important to you, Jimmy," the creature said in an urgent whisper. "You think this is all a dream – but it isn't! You're in mental space now, Jimmy. You must remember what you were told that day in the Beachhead office by Silvia London. You remember her, don't you? The one with the big knockers? Well, everything she said was absolutely true!"
Nicklin frowned. "That would mean you have an independent existence of your own, and that I can't harm you."
"Yes, but I'm not a true mindon entity." The creature shot a quick look behind itself, in the direction of the mountainous presence which might or might not exist in the blackness, and its disconsolate expression turned into one of purest misery. "Your real Uncle Reynard is somewhere else in this continuum. The only reason I exist at all is that I'm a projection of part of your childhood personality, and if you start interfering with things–"
"You mean – if I grow up."
"You grew up years ago, Jimmy." The creature produced a shifty, ingratiating smile. "You grew up great! The way you exploded those three ape men in Altamura was a treat to watch. Specially the third one, when he thought he was getting away. And then there's the Farthing bitch. I'll tell you something for nothing, Jimmy – she's sorry she ever got on the wrong side of you. If you went to her right now you could–"
"Go!" Nicklin commanded, his entire consciousness given over to hatred. "Cease to exist!"
The creature gave a snarl of fury. Its face began to flow … extruding a bestial snout, teeth becoming fangs … but before the metamorphosis could be completed the entire apparition shimmered out of existence.
Nicklin was left alone, but not alone. Beyond the cone of sickly light, far out acr
oss the half-perceived plain, an enormous shape was moving. In the absence of spatial referents it could indeed have been as large as a mountain, but it also – was this possible? – might have had a human configuration. What was the name of that statue? The one of the man sitting with his fist pressed against his forehead?
Jim Nicklin, the entity said, its voice a silent thunder between Nicklin's temples, the time has come for us to speak to each other.
"I don't want to," Nicklin quavered, amazed by his ability to emit any kind of sound. "I don't want anything to do with you."
That is not true. You know you could not have gone on for much longer as you were.
Nicklin pressed his back against the metal doorframe – his sole remaining contact with the universe of rationality. "Who are you?"
Come on now, Jim! You know perfectly well who I am.
"How … how could I?"
Because you have communed with me many times throughout your adult life.
"Communed? I've never been a believer. The only deity I ever acknowledged was … the Gaseous Vertebrate!"
Well done, Jim.
"But that's impossible! You're just a sort of a private joke. I mean, I invented you!"
No, Jim – I invented you.
Somehow Nicklin managed to resuscitate the argumentative side of his character. "I'm sorry, but I can't go along with that," he said. "It doesn't even make dream-sense to me."
You always have to make things difficult. I simply wanted to personalise myself for your benefit. Your conception of the Gaseous Vertebrate … the Supreme Prankster … is as near as you have come to visualising a higher order of being.
"I meant him as an analogue of blind chance."
Yes, but you personalised him.
"Nevertheless, it's wrong to think of you as the Gaseous Vertebrate?"
It doesn't have to be wrong.
"Are you claiming to be God?"